The Complete Ballet Page 3

  In La Sylphide, the wedding ceremony takes place near a church, on a grassy rise overlooking the river. Chairs have been brought for the older people, and standing behind the chairs are the friends, mainly Effie’s friends, all Effie’s friends in fact. James has no friends. Except Gurn, who’s in an odd position. He wants to wish his old friend well but his jealousy is making that difficult. He’s looking around, hoping the Sylph will appear but when she does appear, because she’s a sylph, she’s invisible to him and to everyone but James. People notice the wind in the trees or the leaves falling, but James can see her behind the leaves, gliding from one tree to another, inviting him to come closer. He’s standing by the altar now, watching her while everyone has turned to watch the bride, beautiful and white, and the Sylph is asking James to love her, and to prove his love by dancing with her. And when Effie stands beside James, her husband-to-be, she’s not aware of his distraction because she’s distracted by her own emotions. And as the priest reads the text and as the couple are about to solemnly swear their vows, and their lives, and exchange their rings, the Sylph appears behind the priest. James is about to do as he’s instructed, to place his ring on Effie’s finger, and that’s when the unseen Sylph reaches out from behind the robes of the priest, snatches the ring, and slides it over her finger. And because she’s invisible it looks like the ring is rising of its own accord, sliding onto what looks like thin air but it’s her. And she’s not invisible to James. He can see her and hear her and he understands what she’s telling him, that she’ll die without him. Then she runs down the hill and into the forest by the river. The priest is bewildered. The guests are bewildered. No one can tell exactly what happened because no one could see the invisible hand. And they’re even more bewildered when James suddenly takes off running, running after something, or away from something, they don’t know because they don’t see the girl. And the Sylph is not dumb. She knows when she dashes off into the forest she’s enticing James, and the root of entice is to set on fire, and James can feel the fire inside his body, and without thinking he makes the decision to chase what fuels that fire. His idea is to save the girl by loving her, and Gurn, who loves Effie, probably feels good. He’s been vindicated. You see, I was right about the girl, and I was right about James. But Effie can’t listen. James is running away from me, that’s what she thinks, and the root of distraught is to tear apart, and she tears herself away, running back into the church, followed by James’s mother, who tries to console her, and Gurn is also there, his hand on her back, patting her back but she’s inconsolable. And that’s when Madge appears. Really she’d been there the whole time, but when the lights change, there she is, sitting in a pew, and Effie is next to her, in front of the altar, her face buried in the seat of the pew and Madge, when she tells Effie she has to forget about James, takes the girl’s head in her hand and turns the head, directing its gaze at Gurn.

  The Bakery Girl of Monceau is the first of what Eric Rohmer called his Moral Tales. It’s a short film, twenty minutes long, but in it a lifetime of choice is condensed into a ménage à trois that takes place in the narrator’s mind. A young man, walking down the street with a pal, sees a beautiful young girl who he talks to, and she talks to him, and they arrange to meet. And the young man is elated until he realizes, when he tries to find her, that he’s lost her address. In Rohmer there’s often someone getting the wrong address, and so the next day the narrator rings what he thinks is her bell, and when there’s no answer he wanders around her neighborhood. Day after day he does this, until he’s almost but not quite ready to give up. He stops at a bakery to have a pastry. He talks to the bakery girl. He enjoys the pastry, and he enjoys the flirtation with the girl, and he’s the one who initiates it. Although the bakery girl is not as beautiful as the first girl, she’s young and therefore eager, and they enjoy each other’s attention. He enjoys the role of the older man, and he makes it a habit, to stop every day and have a pastry, gradually forgetting about the first girl because his flirting with the bakery girl becomes more than flirting. He begins wooing her. And she likes being wooed, and because the movie is told from his point of view we can’t know for sure but it seems as if she’s falling in love with him. It’s obvious she likes him. And by this point he’s stopped thinking about the first girl, following the trajectory of the story, getting more and more intimate with the bakery girl until finally he asks her for a date. The girl is cautious, she wants him to promise he’s not just leading her on, and no, he assures her, and they find a time that’s suitable for both of them, and on the appointed day, on his way to the bakery, he runs into the first girl. She’s walking on crutches. Apparently she broke her ankle, which is why she wasn’t able to answer her door but now she’s feeling better. And the heart of the movie is his decision. To honor his date with the bakery girl or to forget his promise and be with the woman who now seems to be the one he might actually love. In the movie it’s not clear what he’ll do but of course he leaves the bakery girl waiting for him, walks off with the beautiful girl and basically that’s the story. Rohmer said the movie’s subtitle, A Moral Tale, didn’t refer to what was moral in the sense of being decent and honorable, but rather to the fact that all our relationships with people have moral implications, filled with decisions about how we choose to be.

  Unlike Cosmo’s club, the Ship Ahoy was a club for gambling. The men who ran it weren’t mobsters exactly, or gangsters, but when we stepped out of the limousine, still holding our champagne flutes, someone must have recognized Cosmo because a door opened and a large man, like a bodyguard, led us down a hallway and into a low room with a sprayed acoustic ceiling. A picture window framed a view of the dark harbor, and there was a round table in the middle of the room, with chairs, and a few men were sitting in the chairs. That was the poker game. Rachel and I were given seats along the wall, our backs against its faux wood paneling, and I watched Cosmo walk to the table like walking into another room, a brightly lit room that put everything else in darkness, including me. And Rachel. Which doesn’t mean we weren’t taken care of. Waiters brought us pastries and dipping sauce, and yes, I was drinking. First of all, the drinks were free, and once you cross the line of drinking, it’s hard to draw the line because the line is already behind you. And although I’d told myself I wouldn’t drink too much, I wasn’t listening to myself. Plus, I was sitting next to Rachel. I was sitting on a gold, slightly padded convention-hall chair, and the place had a nautical theme. Fishing nets and life preservers, and anchors were hung along the walls. The waiters were serving us seafood wrapped in bacon. I assumed that Rachel and I, since there was nothing else to do, would talk, but the way the chairs were set against the wall, it was like we were an audience, or at a trial, facing the round table in the center of the room, and I’ve never been to the Colosseum in Rome but it must have been like this, with the poker table where the gladiators would have battled. And because the table was our focal point, although we couldn’t see the details of the game, we were both looking in the direction of the five men, watching them holding cards, pushing chips to the center of the table. The room was cool and the chair I was sitting on was cool, and I was wishing I had something engaging to say. I knew the harder I tried to be engaging, the less engaging I would be, so I asked her a simple question about her job at Cosmo’s club. And we talked a little, about performing and nakedness, and it was a nice enough conversation but when it was over, when she turned her attention back to the poker game, that’s when I noticed the goose bumps on my arm. Or goose flesh. It appears when the tiny muscles attached to the base of our hair follicles contract, something to do with the fight-or-flight response, or sexual arousal, and I mention it because Rachel was sitting very straight, her neck long, her arm bones pulled into their sockets, and because she was staring off toward the poker game she didn’t know I was following her follicles, from her wrist to her arm, the fine hairs tracing a path up her neck, over her ear and I noticed a mole near her hairline. I didn’t want to stare but I felt my
self getting lost, in her, and in the thoughts that arise when you’re absorbed by your own concentration on something, and I was surprised when a man, a large man, stepped up to us, me specifically, and in a hollow voice said something about offering me a seat. At the table. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. The card-playing table? Apparently one of the players had left and now a seat had opened up, and this could be one of those moments, I thought, when you can change the course of your life. The man’s name was Freddie, and I could see Cosmo waving me over, but I don’t even play poker. I play, but I’ve never been very good, never really enjoyed it, although my father was excellent poker player. He used to play with Gregory Peck, the movie star. He called him Eldred Peck, said Eldred still owed him twenty dollars, and from him I learned the basic elements of poker, the most interesting being the bluff. Since no one knows what cards are held by the other players, if you can make a player think you have a winning hand, it’s possible to win with a terrible hand. Which requires acting. Which requires psychology. Which is interesting to me because I like to watch the way people walk, the muscles they use, but I don’t consider myself an actor. But Rachel was telling me to join the game, to go play, to have some fun, and Cosmo was signaling me, so I stood up and followed the signal. I followed this Freddie person, who said that any friend of Cosmo’s, and he didn’t say what about any friend of Cosmo’s, but it felt good to be respected, or a friend of someone respected, and with his massive hand spread across my latissimus he guided me to the table where he pulled out the chair that had been occupied by someone and now was occupied by me. And the chair was probably radiating heat but I didn’t notice because I was feeling the excitement of joining the game. Whatever chemical causes elation, I was feeling a surge of it, looking around at the men at the table, all of them older than I was, most of them smoking cigars, drinking amber-colored drinks which turned out to be whiskey, and I’ll have one too. If I was going to cross the line, I might as well dive in. A waiter brought me a glass of scotch with one rock, a single piece of ice melting in the alcohol. Introductions were made, people nodded, and the dealer asked me how many chips I would like, meaning how many chips did I want to buy. Ah-hah, I thought. We were going to be using real money. I didn’t think of that when I let myself get led to the table.

  The story begins with La Sylphide because, apart from being the first Romantic ballet, it has an interesting witch. The music isn’t as good as Tchaikovsky’s but when the second act begins, when the curtain rises, we see Madge, not dancing because witches don’t quite dance in Romantic ballet but if they did it would look like this. A clearing in the forest. Madge and her two companions, also witches, are swaying and writhing, waving their arms around a boiling cauldron, calling for revenge. They’re not actually saying the word revenge because their sense of grievance has made the object of their revenge unimportant. The whole world, they seem to say, will do just nicely. And I say cauldron but it’s just a large pot, like the boiling vat in Shakespeare’s Scottish play except the ballet witches dancing around this pot are a little more sexual. That’s how it looks to me. Their anger is erotic, or they’ve made it erotic, and according to what I’ve read, in modern versions of the ballet the witches perform a striptease. They unbutton their dark cloaks, letting them fall off their strong shoulders, and by revealing what they are they’re challenging the world to accept what they are, underneath. And I say underneath because from the earth they draw their power. They’re creatures of the natural world, using their knowledge of the natural world to make what seems like magic to us because the natural world is mysterious to us. They call on the earth and the trees and the sky, and what they’re trying to do is alter the course of events. And you do that by making choices. You move to a new city, make friends with a stranger. Events in your life are altered by the choices you make and the witches take that one step further. They’re altering the choices other people make. Madge instructs her sister witches, telling them what herbs and tinctures go into the pot, and nakedness at this point isn’t gratuitous because it connects the contradictions of what they’re doing, the science of what they’re doing with the magic. Unlike Taglioni dancing the Sylph, the witches dance in a style called terre à terre, their feet never leaving the ground. Their hands move in circles above the pot, their guttural recitation blending into the ingredients of the pot, and what makes this scene notable is the fact that the witches, being played by men, allow themselves to be men. Men playing women. Therefore both man and woman. Androgyny gives them power, and when the spell has been finally cast, and Madge pulls a scarf from the steaming liquid, the scarf has been transformed.

  I knew enough about poker to know that a large percentage of winning is luck. And although I’d never won a lottery, or won anything really, I’d always thought of myself as having an amicable relationship with fortune. You can’t will luck or create it, all you can do is allow a space where it feels welcome and comfortable, and that’s what I was doing. Cosmo was across the table, to my right, and at the beginning I imitated his style, the way he fingered his pile of chips. By imitating his style I got not only a feel for the game but also a confidence in my ability to play. When the dealer dealt our cards, some faceup, some face down, I was being a beginner. And I had what they call beginner’s luck. Although I didn’t win the first hand I did win the second, and the bets weren’t big because they didn’t want to scare me away, and as the game went on my imitation of Cosmo was doing better than the actual Cosmo. I knew to quit when I was ahead, to wait for the wave and then ride the wave. And I knew when a bald man with a mustache was bluffing me, trying to make me think he had a better hand than he did. I had three nines, which wasn’t fantastic but I had a hunch, and a hunch is an intimation of luck, invisible but swirling around us and in us, and I kept up with the man, betting as much as he did, and in fact betting most of my money, and it wasn’t confidence but was just as good, and when we finally presented our cards my three nines beat his three sevens. I couldn’t tell if Rachel, sitting against the wall, was watching me but if she was she would have seen that my pile of chips was growing. The chips were different colors, in denominations of five, ten, twenty, fifty, and one hundred dollars, and I was up quite a few hundred dollars. I didn’t count my chips, why tempt superstition, and the night went on like that, me winning occasionally, and yes, I was losing too, you can’t help but lose a little, but I was getting used to losing and winning, and also I was drinking. I changed my order from scotch on ice to gin and tonic, heavy on the tonic I told the waiter, and I knew that drinking too much wasn’t good, that being inebriated wouldn’t assist me in my quest, which was less about winning and more about being a person who could wait for the waves of luck and then ride them. I would have been content to break even, to enjoy the play of the game, and in fact as I sipped the gin and tonics, and as the game continued, I lost enough of my chips to put me back where I came from, financially. I still felt that luck, like a friend or a lover or a sense of self, was hovering nearby. Like a seed, blown on the wind, and once it falls to earth it needs the right kind of soil, the right amount of water and sunlight, and although there’s no guarantee, I was pretty sure luck would eventually pop up, like a tree, or a plant, and until it did I kept playing. Playing and drinking, and I wasn’t drunk but I wasn’t myself, that’s the expression, not quite myself, and it’s natural to lose a little. Cosmo was also losing. And I wasn’t losing a lot. But enough. Not desperate yet, but I didn’t want to miss the moment when luck would eventually return. So I kept making bets, and because I was aware they were unintelligent bets I felt I was in control of my losing, and by remaining in control, when the time came, I would also control my rise back up to the break-even point. The question was, when would that time come. Everyone at the table was waiting for that time. Cosmo, my normally effusive friend, was quiet, relaxed, not looking up at me, or when he did, not expressing any concern or encouragement, and although his self-sufficient relaxation was worthy of emulation, when I tried to sit
like he sat, elbows down, cards held at my heart, I didn’t feel what sitting like him felt like.